▶ Your Answer :
How often do you go to a public library? According to the research conducted by Board of National Education(BNE), only 14% of citizen regularly go for the public libraries to borrow some books. In other words, it is not fully functional not as much as government intended to do. Also, unlike, national defense, public education, or public transportation, it is easily be substituted.
First of all, advantages of having public libraries could be replaced by various other organizations as well as advanced new technologies. This replacement may be more successful, in terms of its effectiveness. Now days, civilian organization, such as non-profit organizations or companies, provides similar services to the general public in order to fulfill academic thirst and facilitates their use of knowledge. Actually, this new wave turns out to be even more effective than traditional role of public libraries. Personally, I have witnessed that my local public library had been replaced by a private library. Local neighborhoods had protested worrying about disastrous result it may bring. However, the new library operated by large capital have performed quite well, applying new technique connecting local people with mobile application system to provide a number of useful experiences. The negative effect did not happened, in fact, the whole community became supportive to this change. This might also be true in this case either, since there are a lot of resource able to replace this function. Second, in terms of cost-efficient aspect, reducing the size of public libraries would bring bigger benefits. The resources put in to this sector have not been use efficiently by and large. What I mean was that cost of books and maintenance as well as salary of librarian do not give direct influence to society, compared to other sector of the government. According to the study, conducted by Associated Committee of National Government Evaluation (ACNGE), the number of citizen who have regularly read books does not have significant relationship with their economic productivity. This result shows that the budget thrown into public libraries are, indeed, inefficient. This lead to the conclusion indicating the government should deviate from their traditional old habit of spending, wasting valuable source in inefficient sector, but invested it into real lucrative area promoting the best of social benefit.
For these reasons, I believe that the area of public libraries are the first area where governmental downsizing should be made. |